How would you interpret the word ‘guns’? How would you interpret the word ‘guns’ in the phrase ‘there was snow on the guns’? Does it refer to the rifles or the cannons or both of them? According to the context, it seems they were in the trench. Would the army deploy cannons in trenches? I haven’t been in the service, but from the war movies, I have seen there are only soldiers with rifles in the trenches. So I guess the word ‘guns’ in question refers to the rifles. What do you think? Thanks. It’s from A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway.the context: The forest of oak trees on the mountain beyond the town was gone. The forest had been green in the summer when we had come into the town but now there were the stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up, and one day at the end of the fall when I was out where the oak forest had been I saw a cloud coming over the mountain. It came very fast and the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in it and it was snow. The snow slanted across the wind, the bare ground was covered, the stumps of trees projected, there was snow on the guns and there were paths in the snow going back to the latrines behind trenches.